BY SAM WAINWRIGHT
SYDNEY
The Royal Commission into the Building and Construction Industry, although
based in Melbourne, has also been holding sessions in other cities, including
Sydney. The most recent Sydney session finished on August 30. Green
Left Weekly spoke to the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy
Union's (CFMEU) NSW construction and general division secretary Andrew
Ferguson about the proceedings.
The most recent hearings were dominated by allegations against union officials and delegates of thuggery and standover tactics. The commission allows all kinds of allegations to be made against the CFMEU and published in the media (without allowing the union to sue for defamation), but denies the union's lawyers the right to immediately question the accusers or call their own witnesses.
Accusations against the union have regularly made headline news in Sydney's corporate press, while the union's reply has appeared days later in an article the size of a postage stamp. This process is lubricated by the commission's $700,000 media budget. The commission is providing the Coalition government and the media with a steady stream of juicy stories to pave the way for its next wave of anti-union industrial legislation.
The NSW CFMEU has taken court action seeking to have Terence Cole removed as the commissioner because of his bias and a lack of procedural fairness. Ferguson explained this move, We're not confident of any victory in the court system, but it's possible and therefore we want to swing a blow.
An allegation made against CFMEU official Tom Mitchell is typical of the commission's approach. An employer claimed that Mitchell had rung her at home, demanded money, threatened to harm her children and compelled her to go to the police over the matter. Despite strong resistance from the lawyer assisting Cole, the CFMEU's lawyer succeeded in having the relevant phone records made available. As Ferguson explained, the story turned out to be a fabrication:
That night, the woman did receive five phone calls. One was from the Master Builders [Association], one was from the Office of the Employment Advocate and there are three others that are identified as being not from the union and nothing to do with the union.
The report at Manly police station verifies that she did go to the police station and it wasn't in relation to our union but a sub-contractor she owed who was demanding their money.
Ferguson is angry at the commission's refusal to acknowledge the wrong done. In the first sittings, a union official made a widely publicised confession that he had lied and he was referred for prosecution for perjury. The employer in the above case, however, was not. The commission refused to recall her.
There have also been newspaper headlines claiming that the CFMEU stood over employers for donations for a variety of funds such as the union's family picnic day and its fighting fund.
Ferguson explained the fighting fund: We've got close to half a million dollars in it and we've built it up to make sure the union has resources to meet periods of attack and repression. We've always had a long-term approach to the union and we've seen these sorts of attacks in history. The union was deregistered from 1948 to 1962. We had a royal commission in the 1980s and we've got a repeat of that repression against the union now, so we've consciously built up our reserves.
We get donations from members when we do a successful wage claim, individual donations from members I put $25,000 into it from a defamation settlement, all our directors fees from our officials on boards go into our fighting fund. None of it ever is a result of a fine being imposed on an employer or pressure on an employer to donate.
Also in the building industry we have builders and developers that go bust and don't pay sub-contract companies. We intervene, we help [the sub-contractors] to recover money. In return for our assistance we ask them to donate to our fighting fund. There has never been an employer that has said they've been pressured into donating to the union picnic or the fighting fund.
Ferguson also spoke about the ties between former CFMEU official Craig Bates, some CFMEU delegates and organised crime figures. It has been alleged that in return for contracts and other favours, a crook called Tom Domican was going to support Bates' attempt to take control of the union. Ferguson asserted that members involved in that sort of activity had been cleaned out of the union.
He said: We didn't cover it up. We went to the police with it and dealt with it within our rules and amongst our membership. There really was a conspiracy back then for these people to take control of the union and we had a very difficult struggle against it. Our position in Sydney is that we're not going to do business with anyone that associates with organised crime. The job is hard enough as it is, [without] standover men approaching delegates and members when they've got problems.
From Green Left Weekly, September 18, 2002.
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